During the contest for Durham, in 1820, a number of copies of an election squib, written by a humble individual connected with a northern newspaper, and entitled “A Sublime Epistle, Poetic and Politic, by James Brown, P. L.” was sent him for distribution; these, after printing an explanatory address on the back of the title, wherein he called himself S. S. L. D., the “Slayer of Seven Legions of Devils,” and disowned the authorship, he turned to his own emolument by selling at sixpence a copy.
In religious affairs Brown was extremely superstitious; he believed in every mad fanatic who broached opinions contrary to reason and sense. The wilder the theory, the more congenial to his mind. He was successively a believer in Wesley, Messrs. Buchan, Huntington, Imanuel Swedenburg, and Joanna Southcote; had he lived a little longer he would probably have been “a ranter.” He was a great reader, and what he read he remembered. The bible, of which he had a very old and curious pocket edition in black letter, was his favourite work; next to that he esteemed Alban Butler’s wonderful lives of the saints, to every relation of which he gave implicit credit, though, strange to tell, he was in his conversation always violent against the idolatries of the catholic church.
When Brown was a follower of Mr. Buchan, he used to relate that he fasted forty days and forty nights, and it is to this subject that veterinary doctor Marshall, of Durham, his legitimate successor, alludes in the following lines of an elegy he wrote on the death of his brother poet and friend:—
“He fasted forty days and nights
When Mr. Buchan put to rights
The wicked, for a wonder;
And not so much, it has been thought,
As weigh’d the button on his coat,
He took to keep sin under.”
So said a Bion worthy of such an Adonis! but other accounts differ. If we may credit Mr. Sykes, the respectable author of “Local Records,” Marshall erred in supposing that the poet, camelion-like, lived on air for “forty days and forty nights.” Mr. Sykes relates that in answer to a question he put to him as to how he contrived for so long a time to sustain the cravings of nature, Brown replied, that “they (he and the rest of the party of fasters) only set on to the fire a great pot, in which they boiled water, and then stirred into it oatmeal, and supped that!”
Brown was very susceptible of flattery, and all his life long constantly received letters in rhyme, purporting to come from Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, Southey, Wilson, and other great poets; with communications in prose from the king of England, the emperor of Morocco, the sultan of Persia, &c. All of these he believed to be genuine, and was in the habit of showing as curiosities to his friends, who were frequently the real authors, and laughed in their sleeves at his credulity.
In 1821, Brown received a large parchment, signed G. R., attested by Messrs. Canning and Peel, to which was suspended a large unmeaning seal, which he believed to be the great seal of Great Britain. This document purported to be a patent of nobility, creating him “baron Durham, of Durham, in the county palatine of Durham.” It recited that this title was conferred on him in consequence of a translation of his works having been the means of converting the Mogul empire! From that moment he assumed the name and style of “baron Brown,” and had a wooden box made for the preservation of his patent.
Of the poetic pieces which Brown was in the habit of receiving, many were close imitations of the authors whose names were affixed to them, and evinced that the writers were capable of better things. One “from Mr. Coleridge,” was a respectable burlesque of the “Ancient Mariner,” and began:—
It is a lion’s trumpeter,
And he stoppeth one of three.
Another, “from Mr. Wilson,” commenced thus:—